Announcing Pegasus Frontend

fluffypillow

@meleu as soon as it's generally in a usable state, I'll open source it. There are some basic features I'd still like to work on before, like gamepad navigation, but I can make an alpha release this week or the next probably.

fluffypillow

I've made a new video:

(I did cheat a bit, I've turned off displaying the videos, but that doesn't affect the loading speed anyway. Also it's "just" 750 games this time.)

For some reason starting right after boot, like ES2, takes 1 second longer... interesting. Anyway, according to the logs, game data loading took 1991ms even with this delay.

cafarellidigital

@fluffypillow goddamn that's some smooth scrolling and loading.

itskryode

@fluffypillow said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

"just" 750 games this time

JUST?
ARE YOU CRAZY?
THIS WILL (and I mean will) EXCEED THE PERFORMANCE OF RETROPIE

TMNTturtlguy

@fluffypillow will we be able to use current themes from ES on this front end or will we need to rebuild them in a different format? Looks like some cool modifications could be done to my themes! Have you thought about a screensaver like @fieldofcows and @pjft have built for their ES fork? The screensaver is the coolest feature and would be a great addition to what you are working on. Looking forward to testing this one out soon......this might mean I need a 4th SD card so I can keep running all the different builds I am working on!

fluffypillow

@TMNTturtlguy It uses a different format, but I think it would be possible to write a converter script. Haven't thought about the screensaver before, but yeah, that's a good idea!

InsecureSpike

wow, looking awesome!
great work!

teknomusik

Any chance this front end could have a menu for loading / previewing save states similar to the NES Classic menu?
nes classic menu

fluffypillow

@teknomusik well that depends on the emulators; if the frontend can read the states, displaying them is not a problem. Most emulators use their own save state formats, so we'd either need some common file format, some information about the individual saves, or some kind of plugin system for the individual emulators/formats.

fluffypillow

This week's progress:

improved screen resolution / aspect ratio support
added different box size support
added basic gamepad support
improved game list loading speed by about 30%
some style changes
polished the source code, made the project structure cleaner, internal changes

fluffypillow

Screenshot:

sreenshot

lilbud

@fluffypillow Is there a limit on systems you can add?

fluffypillow

@lilbud yes, 2147483647 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

fluffypillow

As for the "system bar" on the top of the current theme, it loops like the carousel, and shows as many as it can while the name of the platforms remains visible.

fluffypillow

This week Pegasus got open sourced, and is available here. There are no proper releases yet, since it's still in alpha, but you can already build it from source. Automatic build testing has been set up for desktop Linux, Pi1, Pi2 and Windows. It is also confirmed working on Windows 10.

mattrixk

@fluffypillow You're doing some great work mate. I'd love to try this out for windows, but have no idea how to get it from your github to a usable program on my PC.

meleu

@fluffypillow can you be more specific about the dependencies on the README? I mean, which debian packages do I have to install to build the pegasus-frontend?

meleu

@fluffypillow Well, I kinda figured out the dependencies. I'm trying first on my Linux Mint x86. I installed qtdeclarative5-dev and qtbase5-dev and it brought a lot of other packages.

And then I've got this:

$ make
cd src/ && ( test -e Makefile || /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/bin/qmake /home/meleu/src/pegasus-frontend/src/src.pro INSTALLDIR=/opt/retropie/supplementary/pegasus-frontend/ -o Makefile ) && make -f Makefile 
make[1]: Entrando no diretório `/home/meleu/src/pegasus-frontend/src'
cd backend/ && ( test -e Makefile || /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/bin/qmake /home/meleu/src/pegasus-frontend/src/backend/backend.pro INSTALLDIR=/opt/retropie/supplementary/pegasus-frontend/ -o Makefile ) && make -f Makefile 
make[2]: Entrando no diretório `/home/meleu/src/pegasus-frontend/src/backend'
g++ -c -m64 -pipe -O2 -fPIC -fno-exceptions -Wall -W -std=c++0x -D_REENTRANT -DQT_DEPRECATED_WARNINGS -DQT_RESTRICTED_CAST_FROM_ASCII -DQT_NO_CAST_TO_ASCII -DQT_NO_EXCEPTIONS -DQT_NO_DEBUG -DQT_QML_LIB -DQT_NETWORK_LIB -DQT_GUI_LIB -DQT_CORE_LIB -I/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/mkspecs/linux-g++-64 -I. -isystem /usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5 -isystem /usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/QtQml -isystem /usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/QtNetwork -isystem /usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/QtGui -isystem /usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/QtCore -I. -o Api.o Api.cpp
Api.cpp: In member function ‘void ApiObject::onLoadingFinished()’:
Api.cpp:54:11: error: ‘qInfo’ was not declared in this scope
     qInfo().noquote() << tr("Data files loaded in %1ms").arg(m_loading_time_ms);
           ^
make[2]: ** [Api.o] Erro 1
make[2]: Saindo do diretório `/home/meleu/src/pegasus-frontend/src/backend'
make[1]: ** [sub-backend-make_first] Erro 2
make[1]: Saindo do diretório `/home/meleu/src/pegasus-frontend/src'
make: ** [sub-src-make_first] Erro 2

It seems that we have some problem in Api.cpp file.

fluffypillow

Yeah, the documentation is a bit lacking, I plan to add proper guides/wiki eventually.

The Qt version is important (and I've just added a version check to the project file for checking), especially on embedded systems due to the optimizations in the later releases. Unfortunately the Qt packages are outdated on all Debians (including experimental), which is what you've just experienced too (qInfo was added in Qt 5.5, two years ago). For desktop only (X11/Windows), you can download the official development kit from here, and I'm also providing my own Qt builds for and RPi 1/2 and X11, which I've uploaded to the GitHub releases tab (eg. qt58-x11.tgz). These are used for build testing too, but they don't include the debug libs or Qt Creator (making them way smaller than the official release). If you want to use them, you have to extract them to /opt, and use /opt/qt58-xxx_hosttools/bin/qmake.

Cross compilation to Pi is a somewhat more difficult topic, and I could (and probably will) write a whole post about it. In short, you can find the required tools on GitHub, extract them to /opt, add the toolchains' bin directory to your $PATHand use theqmake from rpi1/rpi2_hosttools. You can set up remote deployment in Qt Creator as well.

fluffypillow

Also a few additional notes:

Gamepad support improvements will be added in Qt 5.9; it's going to be released at the end of this month, and I'll increase the required Qt version then
There's no main menu yet, that's what I'm going to work on this week
Please note that Pegasus is less than 2 months old, and is still in alpha
If you do manage to run it, bug reports and suggestions are welcome!